Ann Oliveri

Wordplay

Last night, the local PBS station aired "Wordplay," a 2006 documentary about Will Shortz' annual crossword tournament, a movie as neatly put together as the puzzles themselves. Famous crossword fanatics are featured from Jon Stewart to Ken Burns and Mike Mussina as well as contestants in the annual tournament.

Shortz, the editor of the NY Times crossword and NPR puzzle master, reflects on puzzle-making and puzzle-solving.  He says the most adept are musicians and computer programmers, people who habitually decode symbols, not writeres and editors as most believe.

Learning how puzzles are constructed alone makes this film worthwhile. The best example is the NY TImes puzzle from Election Day 1996.  The clues and answers were constructed to produce two correct results:  CLINTON ELECTED and BOBDOLE ELECTED.  Now that's genius.

Paris nous appartient

Thanks to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, I was able to travel back in time yesterday to the Paris of 1957 by watching one of the first French New Wave films by director Jacques Rivette.  Fortunately, this early work was relatively short, only 140 minutes, compared to one that ran on 13 hours.

This film is best seen in a museum, natural history as much as art, because it reveals something that the director never intended.   It captured the suffering of every generation, blindly fighting off the establishment/Man/power/authority to express itself through art, literature, and music.  Such alienation, such pain!

Today this movie would be made with cell phones in a college dormitory, and be equally self-indulgent and exhilarating, wonderful for all the promise of those engaged in its making.   How will YouTube be archived?

Of course, it was seeing this film with good friends, including one of whom vividly remembers seeing this revolutionary film in his first year at university, was what made it wonderful.   Afterwards, we rounded off the evening at the closest replica we have of a french bistro, Les Halles, complete with indifferent wait staff, for a long leisurely dinner of steak frites, lentils, a lovely Cote du Rhone, and french press coffee.

Where are my sunglasses?